Exporting, modifying, and importing processes
aPriori provides the ability to export and import processes, allowing you to develop and modify processes and then share them across different process groups or VPEs. The export and import procedures themselves are relatively straightforward and are covered in the following two sections:
However, there are a number of constraints and details that you should consider when exporting and importing processes. Import behavior may vary depending on a number of factors, such as the Cost Model Version (CMV) of the donor and recipient process groups, whether the donor or recipient have been overridden, whether or not you are working with overlays, etc.
Constraints:
• This table shows the behavior of an import based on whether or not the "donor" and "recipient" objects (CSL files, field definitions, etc.) have been overridden:
| | |
Baseline | Baseline | Ignore |
Baseline | Overridden | Ignore |
Overridden | Baseline | Import |
Overridden | Overridden | Import |
• The CMV of the Process Group from which the process was exported must exist in the recipient VPE.
• Choosing to import over an existing item will replace anything existing in that item, so it is your responsibility to ensure that nothing is broken as a result.
• VPE data is not transferred to or from overlay VPEs.
However, you can work around this using the Export/Import VPE data tools (see
To export VPE Data to Excel and
To Import VPE Data from Excel ):
1 Export processes from the donor process group,
2 Export all VPE data from the donor VPE.
3 Trim all data other than the relevant processes.
4 Import the process(es) to the recipient process group.
5 Import the trimmed VPE data to the recipient VPE.
• When exporting from an Overlay, a process must live entirely in that level of the overlay. I.e., you cannot build an Investment Casting process in Level A, override just a single operation in Level B, and export from Level B.
• Process export/import is a manual feature that does not provide a lot of automation or error checking. You must take responsibility to ensure that your work is complete and valid. Note that you must:
• Manually perform any template creation, modification, or reconciliation operations. (Templates are not included in the export/import operations.)
• Explicitly specify any associated branch nodes.
• Ensure that the process will work with the CMV of the recipient VPE. For example, inherited items may be different if the exported process was built on CMV50 and is imported into CMV100: the import will simply respect inheritance, it will not verify that the inherited item has not changed from CMV to CMV.
• You may occasionally encounter a situation with an older process where the export does not include all of the data required by the process. When you import the process to another process group, this missing data can lead to a costing error message. For example, the Sheet Metal "Std Press" process references a "Die Base Cost" value which was not included in the Std Press tool shop when the process was written. It was stored in a separate lookup table using a mechanism that has not been used for the more recently developed processes. When you import this process to another process group, you may get an error similar to "Standard Press Tool Shop:Diemaker1 plant:TestVPEStdPress is invalid. Die Base Cost Table is empty in CSL module processes/Std Press/Component/csl/ptaxStdPress.csl at line 221 in CSL module processes" While this is very rare, you must be prepared to perform some manual CSL and lookup table editing to work around the issue (or be willing to have aPriori Professional Services assist you).